Japanese financial services giant SBI Holdings is partnering with New York-based enterprise blockchain software firm R3 to establish a joint venture in January 2019.

Japanese news outlet Nikkei reported that SBI Group is expanding its partnership with R3 to create a joint venture that would promote the use of R3’s Corda blockchain. The partnership would reportedly extend beyond Japan to cover the wider Asian region.

“Europe is the most advanced in blockchain product development,” R3 CEO David Rutter told Nikkei. “The new joint venture will strengthen the Japanese language service, and promote adoption.”

In October of this year, the two companies announced that they were planning to create SBI-R3, a prototype of SBI-Ripple Asia that launched a cross-border payment application “MoneyTap,” to increase the adoption of Ripple’s XRP. SBI has around 10% share in Ripple, and is also the principal shareholder of R3.

After settling the dispute between Ripple and R3 over technology contracts and joint venture agreements, Yoshitaka Kitao, president and CEO of SBI Holdings, urged R3 to create a project that uses XRP as soon as possible.

Earlier this week, R3 launched Corda Settler, an app for payments on the Corda blockchain platform. The app made XRP the maiden globally recognized cryptocurrency to be supported by the app, a move that brings XRP and Corda ecosystems “into closer alignment.”

At the time, Richard Gendal Brown, CTO of R3, said that the deployment of the Corda Settler and its support for XRP as the first settlement mechanism is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together.